A Pentecost Matins Responsory: Loquebantur variis linguis

Loquebantur variis linguis is the Responsory after the second lesson at Matins of the Feast of Pentecost. This video gives, I think, the chant for that Responsory, and then a piece called Paraclitus egrediens; I'm not sure exactly what the second piece is, or what its liturgical function might have been, but it's another of those interesting medieval chants from Hungary.  I really have to look into that at some point!

Anyway, the chant - and very, very pretty it is, too:

Loquebantur variis linguis
apostoli, Alleluia.
Magnalia Dei, Alleluia.
Repleti sunt omnes Spiritu Sancto,
et coeperunt loqui:
Magnalia Dei, Alleluia.
Gloria Patri et Filio,
et Spiritui Sancto.
Alleluia.

The apostles were speaking
in different tongues, Alleluia,
of the great works of God, Alleluia.
They were all filled with the Holy Spirit,
and they began to speak of
the great works of God, Alleluia.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son,
and to the Holy Spirit.
Alleluia.

The blurb at the YouTube page says this, in Hungarian:

Schola Hungarica vezényel:
Dobszay László
Szendrei Janka

Részlet a Schola Hungarica Magyar Gregoriánum 2. Advent - Karácsony - Pünkösd c. hanglemezéről
Kép: Pünkösd (Bambergi Apokalipszis, XI. század)

Google Translate does pretty well with that, as far as I can tell:

Schola Hungarica conducted by:
Laszlo Dobszay
Janka Szendrei

Excerpt from the Schola Hungarica, the Hungarian second Gregoriánum Advent - Christmas - Pentecost c. sound drive

Picture: Pentecost (Bamberg Apocalypse, XI century.)

Here's the second lesson in its entirely from Breviary.net:

Lesson ii
Sed ecce, si unusquísque vestrum requirátur an díligat Deum : tota fidúcia et secúra mente respóndet, Díligo.  In ipso autem lectiónis exórdio audístis quid Véritas dicit : Si quis díligit me, sermónem meum servábit.  Probátio ergo dilectiónis, exhibítio est óperis.  Hinc in epístola sua idem Joánnes dicit : Qui dicit : Díligo Deum, et mandáta ejus non custódit, mendax est.  Vere étenim Deum dilígimus et mandáta ejus custodímus, si nos a nostris voluptátibus coarctámus.  Nam qui adhuc per illícita desidéria díffluit, profécto Deum non amat : quia ei in sua voluntáte contradícit.	But, behold now, if I shall ask any one of you whether he loveth God, he will answer will all boldness and quietness of spirit : I do love him.  But at the very beginning of this day's Lesson from the Gospel, ye have heard what the Truth saith : If a man love me, he will keep my word.  The test, then, of love, is whether it is shewed by works.  Hence the same John hath said in his Epistle : If a man say, I love God, and keepeth not his commandments, he is a liar.  Then do we indeed love God, and keep his commandments, if we deny ourselves the gratification of our appetites.  Whosoever still wandereth after unlawful desires, such an one plainly loveth not God, for he saith, Nay, to that which God willeth.
V.  Tu autem, Dómine, miserére nobis. R.  Deo grátias.	V.  But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us. R.  Thanks be to God.
R.  Repléti sunt omnes Spíritu Sancto : et cœpérunt loqui, prout Spíritus Sanctus dabat éloqui illis : * Et convénit multitúdo dicéntium, allelúja. V.  Loquebántur váriis linguis Apóstoli magnália Dei. R.  Et convénit multitúdo dicéntium, allelúja. V.  Glória Patri, et Fílio, et Spirítui Sancto. R.  Et convénit multitúdo dicéntium, allelúja.	R.  They were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak as the Spirit gave them utterance : * And the multitude came together, singing Alleluia. V.  The Apostles did speak in other tongues the wonderful works of God. R.  And the multitude came together, singing Alleluia. V.  Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. R.  And the multitude came together, singing Alleluia.

I'm not sure where the lesson itself comes from, but Lesson 1 is from Gregory the Great's 30th Gospel Homily, so perhaps Lesson 2 continues that reading.  I don't have the book, and it doesn't seem to be online anywhere. Now, as for Paraclitus egrediens:  there's something in this Google Book (Music as Concept and Practice in the Late Middle Ages) about it, and a reference to Czech medieval music; perhaps Jakub will come along and let us know more.  And that book does look interesting; I'm going to have a look myself in any case.

Here's Thomas Tallis' version, sung by the Tallis Singers:



A shorter version of this text is also used as an antiphon at Lauds and at First and Second Vespers of Pentecost, and also as the Alleluia on the Feast of St. Mark.  Very beautiful, all around.

It's interesting to me that Mary figures so prominently in much of the art for Pentecost; anybody know where that tradition comes from?  It's not Biblical, at any rate - but I'm glad of it.

And of course, I can't put up a post for Pentecost without posting a video of the Sequence - probably my favorite of all Gregorian hymns (and Pentecost has some really great ones!):

Holy Spirit, Lord of light,
From the clear celestial height
Thy pure beaming radiance give.

Come, thou Father of the poor,
Come with treasures which endure;
Come, thou light of all that live!

Thou, of all consolers best,
Thou, the soul's delightful guest,
Dost refreshing peace bestow.

Thou in toil art comfort sweet,
Pleasant coolness in the heat;
Solace in the midst of woe.

Light immortal, light divine,
Visit thou these hearts of thine,
And our inmost being fill.

If thou take thy grace away,
Nothing pure in man will stay;
All his good is turned to ill.

Heal our wounds, our strength renew;
On our dryness pour thy dew,
Wash the stains of guilt away.

Bend the stubborn heart and will,
Melt the frozen, warm the chill,
Guide the steps that go astray.

Thou, on us who evermore
Thee confess and thee adore,
With thy sevenfold gifts descend.

Give us comfort when we die,
Give us life with thee on high,
Give us joys that never end.

Amen.

The Troparion of Pentecost (Georgian chant, "K'urtkheul khar shen")

Another Pentecost treat: some lovely Georgian chant.



From the YouTube page:

Troparion of Pentecost, sung by the choir of the convent of Sameba-Jikheti. It can be found on their CD "Chant melodies."

"Blessed art Thou, O Christ our God, Who hast revealed the fishermen as most wise by sending down upon them the Holy Spirit - through them Thou didst draw the world into Thy net. O Lover of Man, glory to Thee!"

I just love Orthodox hymnody! The texts are always splendid. Here's a PDF of the same text (although not, I think, the same music), from the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North American.

According to OrthodoxWiki:

A Troparion (also tropar; plural troparia) is a type of hymn in Byzantine music, in the Orthodox Church and other Eastern Christian churches. It is a short hymn of one stanza, or one of a series of stanzas; this may carry the further connotation of a hymn interpolated between psalm verses.

The term most often refers to the apolytikion (or "dismissal hymn"), the thematic hymn which closes Vespers. (In Greek churches, the apolytikion troparion is known simply as the apolytikion; in most other churches, it is known simply as the troparion.) This troparion serves as a thematic hymn and is repeated at every service of the day.

Troparia are also found as the stanzas of canons. Such troparia are modeled on the irmoi of the ode.

Troparia are also sometimes used as refrains for chanted psalm verses, though stichera more often serve this function.

Another kind of hymn is the Kontakion:

A Kontakion (also kondakion, kondak, and kontak; plural kontakia, kondakia) is a type of thematic hymn in the Orthodox Church and other Eastern Christian churches. Originally, the kontakion was an extended homily in verse consisting of one or two proemia (preliminary stanzas) followed by several strophes called oikoi (also ikoi; singular oikos, ikos), usually between 18 and 24. The kontakia were so long that the text was rolled up on a pole for use in the services -- the genesis of the name kontakion, which means "from the pole" in Greek. It is typical of the form that each of the proemia and strophes end with the same refrain. Acrostics are also a hallmark of this hymnographic form.

In current practice, the kontakion has been greatly abbreviated. Only the (first) proemium and first strophe are sung or read after the sixth ode of the canon at orthros. The proemium alone is sung at the Divine Liturgy, following the troparia, and most other services of the daily cycle. The kontakion is not sung at vespers.

According to tradition, Saint Roman the Melodist wrote the first kontakion, the Kontakion for the Birth of Our Lord, by divine inspiration. Legend aside, Roman established the kontakion in the form it retained for centuries, and he is the most famous composer of kontakia.

Magnificat from the Gloucester Service (Herbert Howells)

My soul doth magnify the Lord : and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
For he hath regarded : the lowliness of his handmaiden.
For behold, from henceforth : all generations shall call me blessed.
For he that is mighty hath magnified me : and holy is his Name.
And his mercy is on them that fear him : throughout all generations.
He hath shewed strength with his arm : he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat : and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things : and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel : as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed for ever.

“The Brothers of Clear Creek”

From the March issue of the magazine Oklahoma Today:   

“The Brothers of Clear Creek” portfolio by Tulsa photographer Shane Brown earns Oklahoma Today’s second Wilbur Award.

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (March 9, 2012) – Oklahoma Today magazine was named a winner of a 2012 Wilbur Award from the Religious Communicators Council for the portfolio “The Brothers of Clear Creek”  in its November/December 2011 issue. Tulsa photographer Shane Brown  shot the portfolio during several visits to the Clear Creek Monastery  near Hulbert, Oklahoma. Additional awardees this year include Entertainment Weekly, CBS News Sunday Morning, and the feature film The Help.

“What  appealed to me about shooting at the monastery is that I was exposed to  so much different cultural practice,” said Brown. “I’m an observer, and  the camera is the perfect tool for that.”

One  of the challenges Brown faced in photographing the Benedictine monks  who live at Clear Creek, which is the only traditional men’s  contemplative Benedictine monastery in the United States, was the monks’  de-emphasis on the individual. Many of Brown’s photos show the men’s  hands engaged in various acts of work and worship―feeding sheep,  creating icons, and stringing beads together for a rosary.

“We are honored to receive the Wilbur Award for Shane Brown’s beautiful portfolio of life at Clear Creek Monastery,” said Oklahoma Today editor Steffie Corcoran. “Shane’s photos speak eloquently to the quiet universality of faith.”

Brown  holds a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the University of  Oklahoma. He has been a professional photographer for more than twelve  years and also has worked as a cinematographer. In addition to Oklahoma Today, Brown’s clients include The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and This Land Press.

The  Wilbur Award is given to secular media outlets for excellence in  communicating religious ideals, issues, and themes and is awarded by the  Religious Communicators Council. Past magazine recipients of the award  include The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and Playboy. This is Oklahoma Today’s second Wilbur Award; the first was in 1998. Copies of the issue and a .pdf of the article are available at oklahomatoday.com.

Oklahoma Today,  the Magazine of Oklahoma since 1956, focuses on the people, places, and  culture of Oklahoma. A paid circulation magazine, it has subscribers in  every state and many foreign countries. It is published bimonthly by  the Oklahoma Tourism & Recreation Department. For more information,  visit www.oklahomatoday.com. 

Clear Creek is a new monastery, and is still under construction.  I've written about the monks before; click the image on this page to see a video from about four years ago.  This is from the home page of their website:

Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey is a Benedictine  monastery located in the diocese of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was founded in  1999 by Notre-Dame de Fontgombault, a French Abbey which belongs to the  Solesmes Congregation, as does Clear Creek. The Patron Saint of Clear  Creek Abbey is the Blessed Virgin Mary under the mystery of her  Annunciation. See origins for a complete history.

Like the other monasteries of the Solesmes Congregation, Clear  Creek Abbey belongs to those institutes of religious life entirely  dedicated to contemplative prayer, without apostolic works. A particular  emphasis is placed on the solemn celebration of the liturgy.

It is part of the Solesmes tradition to cultivate a solemn,  public liturgical Office. The monks of Clear Creek Abbey celebrate God's  glory in Latin, so appropriate to give an idea of God's majesty, a  sense of the sacred. Thus the monks exploit the riches developed over  centuries in the Church's liturgy and cultivate Gregorian chant.

Clear Creek, which attained Abbey status in 2010, is also offering a chant weekend this fall.  You can listen to some chant samples linked from this page, where some of the monks' recordings are available for purchase. 

Here's an mp3 of the Christmas Responsory Quem Vidistis; here's the sequence hymn Ave Maria.

"Photos of a Clandestine Gay Rights Rally in Tehran"

The Atlantic has an article about this today:

It's not easy to be gay in the Islamic Republic of Iran. A recent United Nations report decried "harassment, persecution, cruel punishment and even the death penalty." Because Islamic law requires four adult male witnesses to prosecute sodomy, Iranian police typically seek confessions, often through torture. Women, easier to convict, are given 100 lashes for each case. Outside of the legal system, LGBT Iranians face widespread and socially accepted discrimination, bullying, and an elevated risk of suicide, according to a UK-based study. "Loneliness is killing me," a 27-year-old man from Qazvin told researchers.

So it was an act of special significance when a small group of young people gathered in a hilly park overlooking Tehran to show, for a few brief but public moments, their support for Iranian gay rights. It was far from the biggest LGBT rights rally on May 17, the International Day Against Homophobia commemorating the World Health Organization's 1990 decision to remove homosexuality from its catalog of mental diseases, but it carried its own significance.

Though the gathering appears to have been small and brief, the young activists photographed the subversive displays, posting the photos to public social media site Joopea, which has a number of Farsi pages. The photos are reproduced above, showing the rainbow flag waving over Tehran, activists holding a sign reading "no to homophobia" on the metro, and rainbow-colored balloons floating through the skyline.

"Note that the individuals were sure to hide their faces to avoid being identified and harassed," points out Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Golnaz Esfandiari, who surfaced the photos, which she calls "rare, if not unprecedented." She adds, "Many Iranians may not know that the rainbow flag is the symbol of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights movement."

For all of the Islamic Republic's discrimination against gays and sympathetic activists like the young men and women in these photos, the country's harsh laws are not as necessarily Islamic as the ayatollah-run regime might like to believe.

"Over the past few years, there have been a number of progressive Shiite clergymen, both in Iran and in places such as Lebanon, who have written revolutionary fatwas regarding gender equality, human rights, rights to privacy, and sexual offenses," Hossein Alizadeh, a program coordinator at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, told PBS's Tehran Bureau. "These fatwas have been used in courts by lawyers with various degrees of success. Although the ruling establishment remains untouched by those progressive views, they can't simply dismiss them as Western and have to take them into consideration as part of the court hearing process."

It's hard to see much momentum for changing social attitudes toward gay rights in Iran, and even harder to imagine official policy relaxing anytime soon. Maybe that's what makes these half-dozen or so young activists so brave, to take pride in something their society insists is shameful, and to stand up for themselves, even if it means risking everything.

James Alison: "But I say unto you: love your enemies...."

From James Alison's Love Your Enemy: Within a Divided Self:

Mirror Neurons were discovered by a group of Italian scientists working at the University of Parma in 1996. They noticed that when a monkey whose brain had been wired to a neural electrode picked up a raisin, certain of the neurons in its brain fired. What astounded them was that when by chance one of the scientists himself picked up a raisin while the monkey was watching, the same brain neurons fired in the monkey as had fired when the monkey itself was performing the activity. These results were replicated across many other experiments, and so it was that the neurons which enable mimicry were identified. These neurons literally mirror the activity of another in the brain of the one watching. Thus they allow actors other than the monkey to be reproduced by and in the monkey and enable its socialization.

When it comes to humans, who are vastly more accomplished imitators than monkeys, scanners are discovering more and more areas of the brain which demonstrate this mirroring activity, suggesting that we have many more, and more widely distributed, mirror neurons than monkeys and that these are fired off from birth onwards by the activity of adults towards infants. So, for instance, within half an hour of birth a baby will stick its tongue out at an adult who sticks its tongue out at it. Within a very short time indeed a baby will be able to defer its imitation of an adult. When an adult makes a face at a baby who has a dummy, or pacifier, in its mouth, and then resumes a neutral face, the baby who is temporarily restrained from responding by the dummy will imitate the facial gesture later, when the dummy is removed.

Even more significant, from much earlier than had been thought, a baby is able to distinguish between an adult doing something (for instance, putting a rubber ring on a stick) and an adult failing to get the rubber ring on the stick, so that the baby is able to get right what the adult got “wrong”. This means that it is not merely adult activity which is being imitated, but adult intention. And so it is that we learn to desire according to the desire of the other in the phrase which is at the root of everything which my own principal teacher, René Girard has taught. And thus it is that we as humans no longer have simple instincts, for food, for sex, for safety. Rather, our very way of being in contact with our instincts is received by us through a pattern of desire which is interiorised within us through our imitation of what is prior to, and other than, the self of each one of us.

A simple related example might be that if an infant is perceived as a gift by its principal carer, then it will receive itself as a gift. If it is perceived as something frightening by its principal carer, then it will mirror the fear in the attitude towards it, and learn to hold itself in fear: it is always the eyes of the other who let me know who I am, and as I detect them perceiving me, so will I find myself to be. And of course, all of us are used to any number of variations of the mixture of love and fear in the eyes of those before whom we are vulnerable.

Further on, he discusses what the Scriptures say about all this:

Let us take a look at the passage of Matthew’s Gospel which our hosts at St Martin-in-the-Fields have suggested to us by their title for this lecture series. You are all familiar with the phrase:

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,

and yet comparatively rarely do we give it its full context, as I will do shortly. The result is that it is presented to us as a kind of heroic moral demand, the sort of thing that would make one somehow especially noble, if unworldly. That is, when it is not presented in a more sinister light, as if it could be paraphrased “Jesus wants you as a doormat”. This is what happens when the phrase is used to urge meekness upon a battered spouse, or passivity upon someone who is genuinely being victimized by someone else. And this of course is the danger of reading a phrase which is illustrative of who we are and how we function, and thus is directive, something which sets us free as it gets along side us and enables our perspective on things to be broadened, as if it were a moral commandment spoken straight to our conscious mind which we must therefore struggle to fulfil irrespective of circumstance.

In fact, however, the context of that phrase, as supplied by St Matthew, is rather different. Here are the verses in question (Mt 5, 43-48):

You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Now of course the phrase “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy” appears nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures. And yet all Scriptures, whatever they actually say, are capable of an interpretation such that those who give voice to them turn them into bulwarks for the cultural creation of identity. Give people a common enemy, and you’ll give them a common identity. Deprive them of an enemy and you’ll deprive them of the crutch by which they know who they are. It doesn’t take much acquaintance with popular preaching, whether of a Christian, Jewish, or Islamic sort, to see how easily a commandment like “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19, 18) can become mitigated by the presence of phrases like:

Do I not hate those who hate You, O LORD? And do I not loathe those who rise up against You? I hate them with the utmost hatred; They have become my enemies. (Psalm 139, 20-22)

In fact, it is perfectly normal for the culture in which we live, and not just modern culture, but human culture altogether, to speak through our minds and our texts such that they, minds and texts, wedded together, become guarantors of reciprocity, and we are confirmed in our assumptions that we should do good to those who do good to us, and take revenge on those who do evil to us. It is this normal human cultural way of living out reciprocity which Jesus is pointing to. He knows that we are reciprocally-formed animals; he seems to understand that we are ourselves radically imitative creatures who are very seriously dependent on what others do to us, for what we do.

Jesus is offering a contrast between this way of being, this pattern of desire which runs us, and how God desires. God, he says, causes ‘the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust’. And our typical reading of this is as if Jesus were saying that God is somehow indifferent, in that removed, detached sense which we normally give to the word “indifferent”. Rather as though God were saying “Well, they’re such a bunch of losers, that I may as well give up hoping they’ll get up to anything good, so I may as well just carry on doing the kind of regular, creative, thing, causing it to rain or be sunny, which seems to be my lot in life regardless of whether they get anything right”.

Far from it! The sort of “indifference” about which Jesus is talking could not be more removed from that sort of apathetic detachment. Jesus is making a point about a pattern of desire which is not in any way at all run by what the other is doing to it, is not in reaction in any way at all, but is purely creative, dynamic, outward going, and able to bring things into being and flourishing. If the “social other” tends to teach us a pattern of desire such that what is normal is reciprocity, which of course includes retaliation, then Jesus presents God as what I call “the other Other”, one who is entirely outside any being moved, pushed, offended, any retaliation of any sort at all. On the contrary, God is able to be towards each one of us without ever being over-against any one of us. God is in no sort of rivalry at all with any one of us, is not part of the same order of being as us, which is how God can create and move us without displacing us. Whereas we who are on the same level as each other can only move each other by displacing each other.

I hope that you now see that the instruction “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” comes as the mid-point, the point of passage, between these two different patterns of desire: the first pattern in which our identity is given to us and grasped onto by us imitative creatures as we mirror each other in our reciprocity; and the second pattern of desire in which our identity is given to us by someone moving us entirely independently of being moved by us. The instruction is not one about being a doormat, it is one about how to be free.

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” means “do not be towards them as they are towards you, for then you will be run by them, and you and they will become ever more functions of each other, grinding each other down towards destruction. Don’t pay them the tribute of giving them that sort of free rental space in your soul. Instead of that, allow your identity to be given to you by your Father who is in heaven, who is not in any sort of reciprocity with them, and is able to be towards them as one holding them in being and loving them, without reacting against them. Given that you can’t do this by a simple act of decision, you will require that your whole pattern of desire, formed in reciprocity be turned around, and the only way to do that is to pray for them. For in praying for them you are beginning to allow the pattern of desire which is God to enter into your life, so allowing you to recognise your similarity with your enemies, rather than your exaggerated differences. This enables you to relativise the way you are towards your enemy, and will eventually empower you to be towards your enemy as God is. Thus you will be free of any contagion from their violence towards you”.

Jesus then goes on to show that it is not only the contagion of hostile reciprocity from which we need to be freed, but also that of friendly reciprocity:

For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?

Whether it is a matter of love or hate, reciprocity is the same in both cases: you are run by the social other, and you become a function of that social other. So, you love those who love you, and become more and more dependent on their approval, which means that you allow your behaviour to be shaped by their expectation, and find yourself automatically tied into having shared attitudes of contempt for those who they despise. But, says Jesus, there is nothing especially good about that: tax collectors do just the same, making good bonds of friendship with the occupying authorities over-against the despised “native population”. Nowadays we might say: arms dealers, or cocaine smugglers are perfectly capable of building up just such bonds of affection among an in-group by contrast with the law enforcement agencies which try to make their lives difficult. Mafiosi of all backgrounds and nationalities have “strong family values”. There is nothing especially good about this sort of thing, which happens throughout human culture, and is simply the result of the sort of imitative animal which we are.

The same applies when we exchange marks of recognition. Giving recognition to those who recognise you: what is that but a sign that you and they are dependent on each other for a fragile sense of respect? But of course, that sort of giving of recognition, and seeking of recognition, being greeted, having “face” always also means by contrast that there are people at whose face you do not look, people you do not recognise because they are of no value to you, people you neither see, nor want to see, yourself reflected in them, so you look away. They become a blind spot for you. There is nothing particularly good about that: there isn’t a tribe, a club, a religion, a culture, anywhere on the face of the planet that doesn’t work in just the same way. The fact is that friendly reciprocity and hostile reciprocity are part of the same thing, variations on a theme of us being run by what is other than us.

But, Jesus says, this being run by the adulatory other, or the excoriating other, which is the same thing, has nothing to do with God. What God’s love looks like is being creatively for the other without being defined over against the other in any way at all. That is what is meant by grace and freedom. It is going to involve breaking through the strong-seeming but ultimately fragile dichotomies of “in group” and “out group”, “pure” and “impure”, “good guys” and “bad guys” which are quite simply the ambivalent functions of our cultural identity, and coming to love other people without any over against at all. Living this out is going to look remarkably like a loss of identity, a certain form of death. And living it out as a human is what it is to be a child of God, and to be perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect.

Interesting that one of the early lessons you learn about "resentment" (described as an especially thorny problem for alcoholics) from the Zen Masters in A.A. is precisely this!  The A.A. aphorism has it that   "Holding a resentment is like giving someone rent-free space in your head."  A.A. has never said, though, that the difference between God (the Power Greater than Ourselves) and human beings is precisely that God is completely outside the human Mirroring system! 

See?  Theology is important.  And perhaps this is exactly why A.A. encourages its members to return to church (or to the synagogue or mosque or temple);  it simply isn't within A.A.'s scope to talk about things like this.   A.A. has many things going for it - I may return to it exclusively at this point, because the church is so confused right now and I'm not getting any help there - but it remains focused on the One Thing, the Pearl of Great Price for the alcoholic:  sobriety alone.  And actually, that's exactly what I'm worried about now, so it may be a good move.

And again:  to me, all of this is a great detoxifier of what may at first seem like toxic ideas in the Bible; they may have indeed been taught in a toxic way. 

Ascension: Ascendit Deus

Ascendit Deus ("God has gone up") is the text for both the first Alleluia and the Offertory for Ascension Day. Here's the Alleluia, sung by St. Stephen's House, Oxford:



Here's the chant score:

And here's the Offertory, sung by the Schola Cantorum Of Amsterdam Students:



Here's the chant score:

The text for both propers comes from Psalm 47; here's the JoguesChant translation (and here's an mp3 of the Offertory from their site):

God has gone up amidst shouts of joy, the Lord to the sound of the trumpet, alleluia

The Feast of the Ascension is forty days after Easter; it commemorates Christ's ascension to heaven post-Resurrection. The story is hinted at in Luke 24:31 and told fully in Acts 1:1-11; it's mentioned in Mark 16:19, too (although it's one of the disputed verses (9-20) in Mark 16). New Advent says of the Feast of the Ascension that:

The observance of this feast is of great antiquity. Although no documentary evidence of it exists prior to the beginning of the fifth century, St. Augustine says that it is of Apostolic origin, and he speaks of it in a way that shows it was the universal observance of the Church long before his time. Frequent mention of it is made in the writings of St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and in the Constitution of the Apostles. The Pilgrimage of Sylvia (Peregrinatio Etheriae) speaks of the vigil of this feast and of the feast itself, as they were kept in the church built over the grotto in Bethlehem in which Christ was born (Duchesne, Christian Worship, 491-515). It may be that prior to the fifth century the fact narrated in the Gospels was commemorated in conjunction with the feast of Easter or Pentecost. Some believe that the much-disputed forty-third decree of the Council of Elvira (c. 300) condemning the practice of observing a feast on the fortieth day after Easter and neglecting to keep Pentecost on the fiftieth day, implies that the proper usage of the time was to commemorate the Ascension along with Pentecost. Representations of the mystery are found in diptychs and frescoes dating as early as the fifth century.

Further:

Certain customs were connected with the liturgy of this feast, such as the blessing of beans and grapes after the Commemoration of the Dead in the Canon of the Mass, the blessing of first fruits, afterwards done on Rogation Days, the blessing of a candle, the wearing of mitres by deacon and subdeacon, the extinction of the paschal candle, and triumphal processions with torches and banners outside the churches to commemorate the entry of Christ into heaven. Rock records the English custom of carrying at the head of the procession the banner bearing the device of the lion and at the foot the banner of the dragon, to symbolize the triumph of Christ in His ascension over the evil one.

In some churches the scene of the Ascension was vividly reproduced by elevating the figure of Christ above the altar through an opening in the roof of the church. In others, whilst the figure of Christ was made to ascend, that of the devil was made to descend. In the liturgies generally the day is meant to celebrate the completion of the work of our salvation, the pledge of our glorification with Christ, and His entry into heaven with our human nature glorified.

Several composers have set this text to music, including Jacobus Gallus (sung here by The Summer Singers of Minneapolis, Minnesota):



Here, The Brethren sing Jackson Berkey's setting:



And who could resist the Giuseppe Giordani version?:



Gerald Finzi's (epic!) English setting, "God is gone up," is perhaps the best known of all; it starts at about 3:20 on the video below (brought to you by the Choir of St John's College). But first, you get Stanford's Justorum Animae (from Three Latin Motets), as a bonus!

"Rust Belt chic: Declining Midwest cities make a comeback"

At Salon.  This is very good news, in many different ways; the old Rust Belt gets a needed lift, even as the East Coast is becoming sclerotic.

I think it will go to lift both areas, in fact. New York - for instance - is completely tired out at this point; nothing interesting happens anymore, because the young and poor (interesting new artists, for instance) are totally priced out, and have been for 30 years. This movement and churning will create new places for startup culture of all kinds - art, music, film, etc. - in some formerly unexpected places. And maybe finally East Coast real estate prices will drop, and some real and vital energy can come into the region again.

More than any other city in America, Cleveland is a joke, a whipping boy of Johnny Carson monologues and Hollywood’s official set for films about comic mediocrity.

But here’s what else is funny: According to a recent analysis, the population of downtown Cleveland is surging, doubling in the past 20 years. What’s more, the majority of the growth occurred in the 22-to-34-year-old demo, those coveted “knowledge economy” workers for whom every city is competing. Pittsburgh, too, has unexpectedly reversed its out-migration of young people. The number of 18-to-24-year-olds was declining there until 2000, but has since climbed by 16 percent. St. Louis attracted more young people than it lost in each of the past three years. And as a mountain of “Viva Detroit!” news stories have made clear, Motor City is now the official cool-kids destination, adding thousands of young artists, entrepreneurs and urban farmers even as its general population evaporates.

It’s a surprising demographic shift that has some in the Rust Belt wondering if these cities should trumpet their gritty, hardscrabble personas, rather than try to pretend that they’re just like Chicago or Brooklyn, N.Y., but cheaper. Detroit has certainly proven that a city’s hard knocks can be marketed, from “ruin porn” coffee table books to award-winning Chrysler ads to “Detroit Hustles Harder” hoodies. Could other Midwestern cities go all-in on their own up-by-your-bootstraps appeal? “I think there’s a backlash in the American psyche that’s longing for that,” says Cleveland native Richey Piiparinen. “Look at Miami. We’ve learned that all that glitters isn’t gold.”

Piiparinen recently referenced this trend as “Rust Belt chic” in a post on the blog Rust Wire, describing its allure as “the warmth of the faded, and the edge in old iron and steel … part old-world, working culture, like the simple pleasures associated with bagged lunchmeat and beaten boots in the corner. And then there is grit, one of the main genes in the DNA of American coolness.”

Demand for decay could spell a new era for post-industrial cities — or run its course as a faddish blip that attracted more media coverage than actual converts. Piiparinen believes the shift could last, as more and more people find themselves not just priced out, but burnt out by increasingly tidy, boutiquey cities like New York and Seattle. “The country in the 2000s, it became about growth, glamour, living beyond your means,” he says. “It was all aspiration. Now we’re comparing the foreclosed glass condo tower to the old brick building that’s stood for a hundred years.”

But Rust Belt chic is at least partly a romantic fantasy, and that makes it a risky way to try to revitalize. Last year, Guernica magazine ran a withering critique of what it called “Detroitism,” the fetish for crumbling urban landscapes mixed with eccentric utopian delusions, “where bohemians from expensive coastal cities can have the $100 house and community garden of their dreams.” What these dreams seldom include, however, are the almost unimaginable systemic problems many of these cities suffer from: failed schools, violent crime, the threat of municipal bankruptcy. Photographers parachuting in to shoot Michigan Central Station and Anthony Bourdain’s gushing endorsement may be clouding the fact that cities in crisis won’t be lifted by chicness alone.
What struggling cities need are jobs, and not just jobs at coffee roasteries in abandoned railroad terminals that make for great style-section articles. “The only way [a turnaround] will really happen is by reintroducing meaningful, equitably compensated work into these cities,” says Catherine Tumber, author of “Small, Gritty and Green: The Promise of America’s Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World.” “This longing can be expressed aesthetically, but it can only be satisfied by restoring the workforce.”

That kind of pragmatic attitude defines Jim Cossler’s approach. The CEO of the Youngstown Business Incubator in Youngstown, Ohio, Cossler wants one distinctly non-gritty thing for his city: software companies. “We don’t want to take any other company,” he says, because software firms are cheap to start up, their location is irrelevant, and they either succeed or fail quickly.

Sexy, it ain’t. But the approach is simple and efficient: YBI uses LinkedIn to find young people who grew up in Youngstown but then moved away and now work in the computing field. “Then we make this pitch to them,” says Cossler. “We pitch them the fantastic software industry growing here in Youngstown, and the prospect of moving back to where their parents and grandparents are, and oh, by the way, have you seen our real estate prices?” So far they’re communicating with 1,800 of what he calls the “Youngstown diaspora,” and 187 of those — who now work everywhere from Austin to Tokyo to Tel Aviv — have asked to meet with him. But Cossler doesn’t believe that anyone who didn’t grow up in Youngstown will ever move there. “We’re making the case that they could run a software company for a fraction of the cost of Chicago, and their kids can see their grandparents more than once a year.”

Of course, Youngstown, population 60,000 and falling, is no Cleveland. And certainly, whatever tactics will work should be employed, be they gritty aestheticism or unsexy pragmatism. But it does point to a conflict: A lot of people love glassy condo towers. They may not want their city to be shabby. There could be potential Rust Belt returnees who disagree with Piiparinen’s opinion that Cleveland’s ossifying railroad bridges are the city’s “best pieces of public art.” Marketing a city as rough-hewn and rusty could attract a certain type of resident, but inadvertently repel another.

“I think there’s a certain schizophrenia going on in these cities,” says Tumber. “The local boosters and government leaders are pushing to rebrand themselves as part of the creative class. But then there are people who recognize that Akron will never be New York, who want to use the assets they do have to create a different kind of urban identity.”

There are ways the two can work in tandem. Tumber points to movements like New Environmentalism, part of which is the idea that repurposing old construction makes these cities a greener choice than, say, San Francisco. And there are many High Line-esque acts of readaptation that everyone can agree on — the Economist recently reported on a dying Cleveland mall that turned itself into an indoor garden.

Page 124 Productions: "Bill W."

Opening May 18, 2012.

Easter Day: Pascha Nostrum

Pascha Nostrum ("Our Passover") is the Alleluia for Easter Day. Here's a beautiful version chanted by the Benedictine monks of the Abbey of Notre-Dame de Fontgombault (France):

 

Pascha Nostrum is also the Communion Hymn for Easter Day. Here it is sung by the Gloriæ Dei Cantores Schola:



The text for both comes from 1 Corinthians 5, v. 7-8:

7 Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 8 Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

Here's William Byrd's polyphonic version of the Communio text:



Here's an another, earlier, version of the shorter Alleluia text, by Léonin (1150 - 1201?); this was recorded by the Early Music Consort of London in 1975 (it says).

 

Don't quite know what this "Medieval Chant of the Cathedral of Benevento" (sung by Ensemble Organum)  is. Beautiful, though!